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Professor Alex Filippenko, an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a world-renowned expert on cosmology, will give the next Sheraton Waikiki Explorers of the Universe public lecture entitled “The Big Bang Theory, Inflation, and the Multiverse: An English Major’s Introduction to the Birth and Early Evolution of the Universe” on Saturday, May 10, at 7:30 p.m. in Kennedy Theatre on the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus.

Filippenko is a professor of astronomy and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the recipient of numerous prizes for his scientific research, and he was the only person to have been a member of both teams that revealed the Nobel-worthy accelerating expansion of the Universe. Voted the “Best Professor” on the Berkeley campus a record nine times, he has produced five astronomy video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored an award-winning astronomy textbook, and appeared in about 100 TV documentaries. In 2004, he received the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

In his talk, Filippenko will explain why, based on observations and theory, astronomers generally accept a Big Bang origin for the cosmos—a hot, dense beginning probably characterized by exceptionally rapid expansion, when the Universe grew at a rate much faster than the speed of light. Very recently, exquisite studies of the cosmic microwave background radiation—the afterglow of the Big Bang—found compelling new evidence for this rapid expansion, which astronomers call inflation. Filippenko will further discuss how natural extensions of these ideas suggest that our universe may be part of a grander structure known as a multiverse and that the complexity of our universe and its ability to harbor life may be quite rare.

Tickets are free but required. Go to uhifa.ticketbud.com to obtain them. Do not call Kennedy Theatre. Latecomers with tickets may not be seated, as people without tickets will be seated on a first-come, first-seated basis starting at 7:20 p.m.

The Explorers of the Universe series, sponsored by the UH Institute for Astronomy and the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel, brings famed astronomers to Hawaii ahead of the next International Astronomical Union meeting, which will bring nearly 4,000 astronomers to the Hawaii Convention Center in August 2015.

Founded in 1967, the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa conducts
research into galaxies, cosmology, stars, planets, and the
sun. Its faculty and staff are also involved in astronomy education,
deep space missions, and in the development and management
of the observatories on Haleakala and Maunakea. The Institute operates facilities on the islands of Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii.